Divine intervention: Google’s Nexus 7 is a fantastic $200 tablet

Like Microsoft, Google shows its own partners how one builds a tablet.

The 7-inch Android tablet is one of the scrappiest models in the gadget landscape. From one manufacturer to the next, one year to the next, these tablets have failed to find an audience or win any vocal supporters. Yet sales for the 10-inch iPad continue to vault higher with each quarter. All the while, companies keep trying to make 7-inchers work, hammering away at the form factor, making the same mistakes (underpowered internals, chunky bodies, poor performance), expecting different results.

The form saw its first measured success with the Kindle Fire, which cracked a few million unit sales in a single month during 2011's holiday season. But the Fire's reception then, and sales performance since, doesn't suggest a raft of blissfully happy customers. While Amazon's tablet has a couple of enthusiastic fans here at Ars, the guess in our review that it would "end up often as a gift from early tablet adopters to late ones" seemed to come true. You wouldn't buy one for yourself, perhaps, but it was a good enough present for the technologically apathetic: Mom, Dad, Grandma, or Technologically Illiterate Sibling.

Enter stage right—well, more like stage from above, the God of Tablets bombing down in a skydiving suit wearing Google Glass—the Nexus 7. Google adopted the internals of Asus's Memo 370 shown at CES in January, revamped the body, and bequeathed the device with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. All while maintaining a $199 base price point.

The specs, design, and cost all make the Nexus 7 seem like the Holy Grail of tablets. As we'll show later, it can even keep pace with the (significantly more expensive) iPads in many respects. It's great. Suspiciously great. Suddenly we have everything we want (well, close to it), for less money than we probably would have paid for it. Selling hardware cheap—in hopes that more money can be made elsewhere—is not a new game. But the Nexus 7 suggests Google is going to play that game harder and better than we've seen in a long time.

More than anything, the Nexus 7 is Google's comment on the state of the Android tablet. The company has delivered both a backhand and a helping hand to its long-suffering hardware partners (or at least to Asus, which partnered with Google on this model).

Body

The Nexus 7 has a 10.45-millimeter thick body, with a Corning glass-covered IPS display and a curved, slightly rubbery, dimpled back. A long slot for the speaker sits on the back, just before it curves into the edge where the microUSB port sits centered on the bottom, next to the headphone jack on the right corner. The only buttons, a sleep switch and volume rocker, are along the right hand side. The NFC sensor is placed on the opposite corner. The Nexus 7 appears to have two pinhole mics, one about an inch above the NFC sensor (for sound canceling) and another on the top left corner (for voice reception).

The Nexus 7's bezel is thicker on the shorter sides, just a hair over two centimeters, while on the longer side it measures 1.1 centimeters. This makes it slightly more comfortable and natural to hold in landscape orientation (when typing, though, portrait orientation is definitely superior). It's too bad Google can't appropriate the iPad's ability to split the keyboard to make it closer to the user's two thumbs in landscape. As it is, landscape typing on a 7-inch screen still creates a lot of strain (ten-finger typing is, of course, right out).

The keyboard is not quite as snappy as the rest of the Nexus 7 experience. It seems to occasionally miss letters, or have to catch up after a series of letters are typed, especially right after waking. This happened infrequently, but was a bit frustrating when it did. Unlike the Kindle Fire, the Nexus 7 is Bluetooth-capable (this was one of our major strikes against the Fire's status as a tablet). Paired with a keyboard, the Nexus 7 could easily serve as a mobile work solution just as the iPad can.

Overall, the body is very comfortable to hold. In carrying it around, I felt I could handle it more like a book than either the Kindle Fire or iPad 2. It feels solid without being too heavy, and the rubberiness of the back keeps it from being too slippery. The dimpled back seems to be entirely an aesthetic choice, and an odd one at that, though we suppose it might be a superior material choice for concealing fingerprints.

Like the Kindle Fire, the Nexus 7 has no hardware home button. Instead, the three Android 4.1 Jelly Bean soft keys are everpresent along the bottom of the screen: Back, Home, and Recent Apps, which will show apps you've used recently in reverse chronological order. The exception to the buttons' appearance is when you are e-reading or watching movies, when the icons will fade completely or be reduced to dark gray dots, respectively.

The Kindle Fire, the Nexus 7, and a Samsung Galaxy S III.

A Kindle Fire stacked on top of the Nexus 7.

By default, the home screen of the Nexus 7 is designed to ape that of the Kindle Fire, with readable media and audio widgets arranged front and center. As we mentioned in our first impressions post, the Nexus 7 comes with a small selection of content pre-loaded. This includes but is not limited to Swann's Way, copies of Popular Science and Esquire, and a few songs from Google Play's Music store. One movie comes pre-loaded, Transformers: Dark of the Moon. That's a battery life tester's dream: turn the volume and brightness up, press play, stuff it between two couch cushions, and go do something else for two and a half hours.

The Nexus 7 weighs 11.99 ounces (340 grams), 2.6 ounces lighter than the Kindle Fire. While we found the Kindle Fire just a bit too cumbersome and heavy to hold up in the air while reading, the Nexus 7's lighter weight and sleeker body means we can successfully hold it up like a book for 20 minutes to half an hour without our arm getting tired. Holding the Nexus 7 by the edge gets tiresome a bit quicker than holding it from the bottom, pinky and thumb propped in front, with the other three fingers supporting it from the back, like you'd hold a paperback open.

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston

327 Reader Comments

I don't know. Isn't it important to turn a profit to be a hardware manufacturer? By all accounts I've read, Google is selling these at cost or at a slight loss - surely manufacturers can't afford to do that across their whole line. Especially when they can't expect any future income like Google and Amazon can from content/ads.

I don't know. Isn't it important to turn a profit to be a hardware manufacturer? By all accounts I've read, Google is selling these at cost or at a slight loss - surely manufacturers can't afford to do that across their whole line. Especially when they can't expect any future income like Google and Amazon can from content/ads.

It's worth noting that Asus announced this thing as a $249 tablet at the start of the year before it was retooled by Google. It was supposedly going to have an amazing camera and 16GB storage at the $249 price point, same price as a 16GB Nexus 7 (although it lost the great camera along the way), so it wouldn't surprise me if the $199 is a minimal margin thing with the 16GB aimed at being the major seller and profit driver.

But unless Asus were taking a hit as well, it seems unlikely Google is losing money on this thing. It might be minimized because Asus needs to get paid as well, but there's no need for other vendors to take that hit too.

This thing looks awesome. Apple definitely needs some competition for the benefit of all. Its profit margins are totally obscene and it's pretty embarrassing for most traditional electronic companies that they do not seem to be able to cut into that. Lower margins for Apple - more money for its customers.

To be fair, the camera issue looks more like a compression problem than a bad camera. Perhaps the Skype app only uses a single core and thus has to scale the quality way down. To get a real sense of the camera, you need a real camera app or at least wait a few weeks for the video chat apps/Skype to be updated to work well with this setup. This is not to say that the camera is outstanding, but I can't believe it's actually really that bad (plus, a bad camera would look different).

How the apps look is another matter. While most apps scale up pretty well to the 7-inch size, there are still some noticeable fuzzy edges here and there. The Android tablet market has provided little incentive for developers to scale up the graphics on their apps for larger screens; 7-inch tablets even less so, as regular smartphones edge closer to that size (witness the strange, and strangely popular, 5.3-inch Galaxy Note). The difference in graphics between the Nexus 7 and larger smartphones is small but visible.

The camera issue definitely seems a little odd. I'd be curious to see if the same problem rears its head with Google+ hangouts or video chat in Google Talk. It seems like this could just be an issue with Skype.

What's unclear to me is whether or not the Chromium-based WebView is present in 4.1, or if it'll come out with the next major version of Android. I'm guessing the latter since Flash appears to work on Galaxy Nexuses running JB.

I think the Kindle Fire's sales numbers have been consistently misinterpreted. The nature of this device and how it is marketed makes it a great gift. But I don't think that ereaders are big impulse buys the rest of the year. Amazon did quite well when it was in season, and I expect they will do quite well this year as well, either with the Fire or with its sequel. And I also expect they will sell much more slowly out of the gift season. I don't think the slow sales this year can be correctly read as failure.

As for the Nexus 7, it sounds like they did a good job, and raising the standard for everyone is a good thing. Personally I am not interested based on "the data it will cull from usage to power its ever-growing ad network" -- I want to see thriving options where the manufacturer and OS designer's primary motivation is to make a great device for me, not one where their primary motivation is maintaining their advertising revenue stream (even if making a good device indirectly helps that goal). Curious to see how the Surface and Surface Pro look when they are released.

I always appreciate in-depth Ars reviews and hope those looking for a tablet in this range will find it helpful. But as usual I must protest the following missing items from The Ugly that I remarked on back when the first seven inches got reviewed:

Under 9"Widescreen

By now the market has confirmed these rejections (widescreen is only useful for video and is actually a hindrance for important tablet uses like magazines and comics, anything under 9" and you may as well use a phone) so the headline for this review had me scratching my head: there is nothing diine here except perhaps the level of insanity that leads more and more under 9" widescreen tablets to be released.

At $200 retail, Google can't make a profit on these Nexus things. Google simply isn't into this long term -- it's just trying to kick start. But the real hardware manufacturers know there is no profit as well. So what is their motivation?

If you want to test video chat quality, you should use the Google native apps like Google Talk (which has video chat) or Google+ Hangout. Clearly, the camera is not as bad as the Skype screenshot suggests.

Google is really amazing in getting their act together. I hope they do a bigger variant as well. 7 inch is great for on the go and book reading. For web browsing and movies on the couch it is a bit small.

I need a foldable 11 incher with the weight of a 7 inch. Yeah, I think I really need that. Or two seven inchers that can be transformed into one big tablet. And a keyboard cover, obviously. Or a pad-phone like thing but well executed and wireless.... Can't wait for the future!

I always appreciate in-depth Ars reviews and hope those looking for a tablet in this range will find it helpful. But as usual I must protest the following missing items from The Ugly that I remarked on back when the first seven inches got reviewed:

Under 9"Widescreen

By now the market has confirmed these rejections (widescreen is only useful for video and is actually a hindrance for important tablet uses like magazines and comics, anything under 9" and you may as well use a phone) so the headline for this review had me scratching my head: there is nothing diine here except perhaps the level of insanity that leads more and more under 9" widescreen tablets to be released.

Putting "under 9"" as ugly is like saying tablets will always be a failure before the iPad is released. Normal people aren't going to buy a product the press isn't raving about and while the Kindle Fire was cheap, it wasnt very good (poor performance) which is why I didn't own one or recommend it to anyone else.

The Nexus 7 is truly the first good 7" tablet, heck it's the first Android tablet worth owning. That's not to say that the Transformer Prime wasn't a good tablet as well, but because it lacks the benefits a 7" tablet has like being able to hold it in one hand comfortably, which makes it excel at reading. Also a 10" relies far more on apps TI be useful, and Android doesn't have them yet.

I don't even need one of these but I kinda want one anyway. $200 for what is essentially an over-sized, phone-less Galaxy Nexus seems too good to let pass for some reason.

I'm not sure what you're seeing, but really the only similarity between this and the Galaxy Nexus is the OS. Just about everything else is fairly different. Quad-core Tegra 3 vs dual-core OMAP. 1280x800 vs 1280x720 screen resolution. There's more, though not really worth getting into. All that said - yes, I want one too. If you're already in the Android camp, it's more for less so you can't really go wrong.

At $200 retail, Google can't make a profit on these Nexus things. Google simply isn't into this long term

Why not? Google Search is free. Google Docs is free. GMail is free. They are just executing on their business model: make money on ads and give the rest for free or at manufacturing costs. Just keep clicking the ads.

At $200 retail, Google can't make a profit on these Nexus things. Google simply isn't into this long term -- it's just trying to kick start. But the real hardware manufacturers know there is no profit as well. So what is their motivation?

Lastly, for serious Web browsing 7" is simply too small.

I think this is somewhat short sighted. You're right Google isn't going to make a profit on the devices, though they may on attached content. I don't see how you can say they're not into this long term though. This is much like every Nexus device before it, a not-so-subtle indicator to the hardware manufacturers where they'd like the platform to go. This also serves to generate some excitement around Android as a tablet platform which may very well spill over to their other hardware partners.

At $200 retail, Google can't make a profit on these Nexus things. Google simply isn't into this long term

Why not? Google Search is free. Google Docs is free. GMail is free. They are just executing on their business model: make money on ads and give the rest for free or at manufacturing costs. Just keep clicking the ads.

It isn't such a good strategy if you want other OEMs supporting your ecosystem. Ars called Surface a kick in the teeth to Win8 OEMs, but really it wasn't. There is still plenty of room/profit for them.

OTH this does suck the oxygen out of the 7" Android OEM tablet market.

If you are Samsung/Toshiba/HTC/etc... It is nearly pointless to have a 7" Android tablet. That market was already tiny, now you have to look at an even tinier/lower margin slice. It hardly seems worth the bother.

I still think that in a few months Asus will release their own branded version with the microSD and microHDMI output the critics are clamoring for (maybe even upgraded/second cameras) but I'd expect the cost to be closer to $300.

How often do you really need that much space nowadays? I fell for that a couple years ago with my phone, so I have 32GB of storage. I parked 14GB or so of music on it back then, which just sits there, hardly used, because of things like Pandora and Google Music. For documents, I just grab things from Dropbox when they're needed. Apps take up less than a gigabyte, even back when I had 140 apps or so installed. Even as a pretty heavy user, for 99% of my uses I could get by with 8GB or less, so 16GB is plenty for me.

The lack of an SD card reader is a bit saddening though, as that would cheaply provide increased storage for those that would like it.

I'd like to see more information about what kinds of peripherals this thing supports. Obviously bluetooth keyboards are supported, but would it be possible to get a bluetooth mouse up and running? This tablet has serious laptop replacement potential for those with low performance / high portability needs and I'd love to put it to the test.

And what about smart cover like stands or MS Surface style covers/keyboards/stands?

Excellent review, it goes into most of the details I wanted from this tablet. A few gaming tests (in terms of Experience and not really framerates) would have been icing although Android gaming isn't even close to the iPad one right now =/

The ghosting issue of the screen is a little concerning but I've noticed similar things with other IPS screens I've owned and it always wasn't permanent. Something to keep an eye on but not likely a huge issue.